Invardii Series Boxset Read online

  BOXED SET: BOOKS 1-3

  THE INVARDII SERIES

  Including

  ANCESTRAL HOME

  ALWAYS BACKWARD

  MEDIEVAL PLANET

  Copyright asserted

  Warwick Gibson

  Table of Contents

  ANCESTRAL HOME

  ALWAYS BACKWARD

  MEDIEVAL PLANET

  ANCESTRAL HOME

  First Book in the INVARDII series.

  Warwick Gibson.

  © 2018 Warwick Gibson.

  All Rights Reserved.

  DISCLAIMER.

  This novel is a work of fiction. It does not draw from actual events. The characters in this story are entirely fictitious, and do not bear any resemblance to any persons living or dead.

  ALSO by WARWICK GIBSON

  And available at Amazon Kindle

  THE UNSOUND PRINCE (Sword and sorcery fantasy)

  ROUGH JUSTICE (Small town Chief of Police)

  MARIC’S REPRIEVE (SAS thriller set partly in Borneo)

  STRUGGLE FOR A SMALL BLUE PLANET (Sci-fi thriller)

  The INVARDII Series

  ANCESTRAL HOME

  ALWAYS BACKWARD

  MEDIEVAL PLANET

  BOXED SET: BOOKS 1 -3

  FEDIC VITS (coming soon)

  RISE OF THE VALKRETHI (coming soon)

  ANTARES CRUCIBLE (coming soon)

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7 CHAPTER 8 CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10 CHAPTER 11 CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13 CHAPTER 14 CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16 CHAPTER 17 CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19 CHAPTER 20 CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22 CHAPTER 23 CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25 CHAPTER 26 CHAPTER 27

  APPENDIX A APPENDIX B

  APPENDIX C APPENDIX D

  DECLARATION OF PERSONAL INTEREST.

  My name is Herodotus. I am an historian.

  Earth is on fire from end to end, and the many star systems of the Sumerian empire have been reduced to a desperate handful. The K’Sarth trading planet has been seared by unimaginable energies and reduced to a blackened ball in space – though their factories, far underground, continue to supply our war effort. The ingenious Mersa have, so far, been spared. As has Orouth, our planet of origin.

  But let me start at the beginning.

  It has been four years since the hybrid creatures calling themselves Invardii boiled out of the galactic core in their great plasma fireships, and claimed our space as their own. Then they renounced our right to live in it.

  Regent Cordez, head of the most powerful trading block on Earth in the year 114 (old cycle 2547AD), has commanded me to commit the years that followed – the tale of our undoing – to indestructible discs that will be spread across the star systems. If the human race should not survive the apocalypse thrust upon us, at least a record of our passing will endure.

  Regent Cordez has told me to assume nothing about our own culture, to write as if alien creatures have stumbled upon these discs in the far distant future. If, therefore, I seem to state the obvious from time to time, I trust the reader will understand why, and forgive me. To avoid repetition, Appendices of basic material have been added to the back of this work.

  The form of this history has been left up to me, as it should. My full name is Herodotus La Marche, the most prominent of the La Marche historians, and you may already know my name. It was a whim of my parents to call me after the Greek historian Herodotus, the ‘father of modern history’. He lived more than 2900 years ago, but the name has turned out to be appropriate. I think my parents were blessed with a little of what the villagers here call ‘farsight’.

  I do not mind that people call me “Herodotus the cripple”, and as I look out from my mountain retreat in the French Alps towards the soft glow on the horizon, where the Siberian forests have been burning for days on end, I feel no need to go and fight on the front lines. What use would I be, with most of my bodily functions performed by machines?

  But I can still do my part. I can undertake the task Regent Cordez has assigned to me. I can contribute to the grand scheme of things, and I can hope that others are doing their part.

  If I were to write one vast historical tome containing everything in the last four years, it would be so dense, and heavily cross-referenced, that only another historian would be able to follow it. That is why I will avoid going about my task in such a way.

  I have decided to tease out individual stories, and pass on a feeling of what these years have been like from the perspective of the people involved. Once I have thoroughly mined the material at my disposal, I will record the events that still lie ahead of us – if I am lucky enough to live through them. These events must lead to some sort of ultimate destruction. Ours, or the Invardii.

  The material I am working with is taken largely from the personal logs of the people involved, and ships’ recordings. The reader will forgive me if I add some imagined details to my stories to make them more coherent.

  This, then, is the first of my narratives about the recent, and very tumultuous, history of the human race. Oddly, it is not about the Invardii. Since Celia Darpagio’s research team returned from the Rothii home world with the unsettling news we did not originate on Earth, rumours and uncertainty have flowed like Spring wine.

  Regent Cordez now needs to get the full story out to the people of Earth – and our allies – as quickly as possible. Only when we are united, by a firm understanding of who we are, will we stand a chance against our vastly more advanced enemy.

  Some people may call this political interference, but I do not take exception to it. I care little for the order in which things happen, my purpose is simply to record them.

  Therefore I bring you the first of my tales, ‘Ancestral Home’, and refer you to the appendices below, as they may be needed.

  Appendix A provides a time-line covering all four years.

  Appendix B consists of brief descriptions of locations.

  Appendix C describes the main characters.

  Appendix D covers the racial groupings.

  CHAPTER 1

  ________________

  Celia looked up from her desk, and then above the partitions that defined her office. Her eyes followed the giant curve of the warehouse wall as it rolled away from left to right.

  She wondered, not for the first time, what would happen if the walls of the underground building were breached. There was rock behind that wall, but it was porous stuff. It would take an industrial-level accident to make a decent breach, though. Those walls were sturdy.

  Her team might have time to get a patch on the affected area, if the damage wasn’t too great, but they might not. The thought of their precious air fizzing up the dust on the barren surface above, while a great many people died down here in the artifact labs, did not excite her.

  The warehouse had been excavated into the side of an opencast mine on Proteus, the second largest of Neptune’s moons, and it was part of the giant Prometheus project. Regent Cordez had built to the highest specifications, pouring the entire output of the prosperous South Am trading block into its construction, but the sprawling base had gone up in one hell of a hurry.

  What wasn’t dug into the rock of the opencast mine was circling the moon as zero-gee factories.

  Celia pushed her work away from her, and stood up. She was glad that a permanent form of gravity-sum had been built into the complex. The alternative had been to spin the moon – 400km across – and build the base so the staff were forever walking on the ceiling.

  When the strange, hybrid Invardii, in their great slab-sided plasma ships, had
come boiling out of the galactic core, Cordez had been the first person to see the threat, and the only one so far to respond to it. EarthGov was still bickering over details while the slim chance of preparing for war evaporated.

  Celia’s team was the best there was in the field of alien artefacts, and that generally meant trying to figure out how Rothii technology worked. The Rothii had disappeared 200 thousand years ago, leaving the Sumerians to carry on their way of life.

  Celia often wondered if the Sumerians had been a slave race, though she would never say that to their bullet-headed, nose-less faces. The fact they hadn’t invented anything new since the Rothii left suggested as much. What did people say, ‘promoted to your level of incompetence.’

  The Sumerians said they followed the Rothii law of non-interference when they met developing races, but the evidence said otherwise. Civilisation on Earth had developed in the Mesopotamian area of Sumer, and the Sumerians’ home planet was called Uruk, the same as the ancient capital of Sumer on Earth. How the Sumerians kept a straight face while they denied ever visiting the Human planet showed the immense cultural difference between the two species. Maybe they were ‘saving face’ or something.

  A recent trip to K’Sarth, a trading planet under Sumerian protection, had produced an exceptional haul of Rothii material for Celia’s team to work on. The Sumerians would be livid if they knew, but the K’Sarth had been surprisingly realistic as the Invardii savaged the outer Sumerian colonies.

  She remembered the moment the trading delegate ushered her through a door into a large room, a room that had been full of intriguing parts with the shiny black surface of Rothii manufacture.

  “What are they?” she had asked in awe, as she walked through the piles of ancient artefacts. She had never seen such a treasure trove of technology.

  “Weapons systems, and parts of engines,” replied the K’Sarth delegate. “We had hoped, over future generations, to assemble a working Rothii ship and sell it for great profit.”

  She had turned and thanked him, and suggested Regent Cordez might trade something of equal value for it, but he had waved away the mention of payment. For a K’Sarth trader, a business transaction without profit went against everything he was, and everything his race stood for. It was most unusual, and Celia appreciated that.

  “Fight Invardii. Save K’Sarth,” the short, stocky figure had said.

  Work on the Rothii artefacts back at Prometheus was going extremely well, thanks largely to the youngest member of her artifact team, Jeneen. Jeneen’s memory had recently become phenomenal. The Rothii machine that was behind her new abilities hung off her tool belt, its receptor discs fixed to her temples where they seemed to work best.

  Jeneen could now read ancient Rothii perfectly, and understand every technical term in the specifications inside the artifact casings. She could recall each of the pieces she had ever worked on, inside and out, and in full and dissembled states. She made leaps of intuition that left the others gasping. At times it was almost as if she were Rothii herself, and had used the equipment before.

  The rest of the team were always scrambling, desperate to get her revelations to the engineers working on the Javelin star fighters that were the reason for Prometheus’ existence. Andre was a stardrive technician, as Jeneen had been before her transformation, and he was still the first to understand what she was saying. The fairly recent relationship between the grey-speckled Andre and raven-haired Jeneen helped them communicate well too.

  Roberto completed Celia’s team. He was an intelligent and very worthy addition. Eight years younger than Celia, she could count on him to clarify her research ideas when she was struggling with them. He was much taller than her, and his curly hair and Italian good looks made many of the women on the base envious of Celia. She shrugged it off. They were just friends.

  At first it had been surmised that the Rothii machine attached to Jeneen’s temples acted like a computer of some sort, but it became clear that Jeneen’s mind was the source of her new mental powers. The density of her brain tissue was up over twenty percent, and still climbing.

  She passed every medical test the Prometheus medical staff threw at her, and her expertise with Rothii technology was desperately needed, so she was allowed to continue using the machine. The Invardii grew nearer to Earth every month, and the stories from the devastated Sumerian colony planets gave little room for hope. All of that was true, but Celia still worried about her youngest team member.

  She decided she needed a walk. It might be a good time to drop in on her team and see how the ‘fuzzy logic’ controls for the Javelins were going.

  She was halfway to the door when the medspotter alert cut into her thoughts, and she reflexively looked up at the diagram above the door to her office. She jumped – the emergency was here, in the artifact section! She stood transfixed, looking at the flashing red dot in the research bay where Jeneen was working.

  God no, not today, please not today, not any day, she muttered to herself, and ran for the back of the warehouse.

  Andre and one of the research assistants were holding Jeneen up. Her colour was all wrong. They were trying to get her into a chair, but her limbs were flopping in every direction, getting in the way of their efforts. Andre solved the problem by slipping behind the chair and wrapping his arms around her from behind, keeping her more or less confined to the chair. The tremors gradually lessened.

  “What happened?” said Celia breathlessly, as soon as she arrived.

  Andre was talking to Jeneen, telling her it was all right. Telling her to relax and not fight it.

  Jeneen took a deep breath, and made an attempt to sit up. She failed, but she tried more strongly a moment later. Andre kept his attention on Jeneen, but he answered Celia’s question.

  “She mentioned feeling tired, and was about to take a break, when her legs went out from under her. We put her in the chair when she couldn’t get up.” He paused, gently stroking the side of Jeneen’s face and telling her to relax, to wait for the tremors to pass.

  “She talked about the muscles in her legs twitching when we were in bed last night, but we’d played a hard game of raquete the day before, and she thought it was just that.”

  The med team had keyed ahead for clearance, and the airlock into the research warehouse cycled open as they arrived through one of the linking tunnels. They began prepping Jeneen for life support as they quizzed Andre on the details, and transferred her to a maglev unit. Andre trotted along beside her as the med team disappeared into the airlock, her little cocoon bobbing along behind them.

  Celia remained behind, devastated by the turn of events. She had always tried to keep her attitude to the team professional, but Jeneen had been like a daughter to her, even if the age gap hadn’t been quite enough for that.

  Roberto arrived, and saw Celia’s distress. He came over and put an arm around her shoulders. Then he started telling her what the team had been working on that day. He was trying to take her mind off her worry, and she appreciated the effort.

  Jeneen had been explaining that a central processing unit in one of the Rothii artefacts used a sense of ‘fuzzy logic’ that made intelligent decisions when faced with multiple choices. Roberto had called the Javelin engineers in, to see if they could apply the same principle to the Javelin computers, and take a lot of the everyday decision-making off the pilot.

  Andre had been following the explanation with interest. It was similar to work he was doing on Rothii weapon systems with multiple targets, and he had reached largely the same conclusions.

  When the engineers left, Andre had checked a couple of his ideas with Jeneen. Then he had kissed her on the tip of her nose and told her she was wonderful. She had grinned, and told him there was no need to try flattery, she was a starter for tonight so he didn’t have to work so hard. Andre had thrown back his head and laughed out loud.

  It was typical of Celia’s brilliant, crazy team, and she laughed at Roberto’s story until she started to cry. Roberto hel
d her quietly until at last the tears stopped. She wiped her eyes and looked around to make sure no-one had seen her. Roberto told her it was okay, but she still looked embarrassed at her emotional outburst.

  “It’s okay to care about others,” he said, smiling, and she nodded.

  Still, it hadn’t been that long since she had talked to Andre about Jeneen’s health, and she felt like she must have missed something. Andre had reassured her everything was normal in the couple’s cramped little quarters. Everything was, in fact, better than normal.

  He had looked embarrassed, and avoided eye contact, when he told her Jeneen had become a lot more inventive in their lovemaking over the last few weeks, but he didn’t see anything wrong with that. Celia had been quite amused.

  “Just enjoy your good fortune,” she’d said with a smile, and slapped him on the shoulder. Andre had taken the advice in good humour, but he still looked a little troubled.

  “Nothing has come up in the tests, and her behaviour has been perfectly normal,” Celia had added. Now she felt like a false prophet.

  “I still worry sometimes,” Andre had said glumly.

  Celia had nodded. They all worried about Jeneen. This was one of their own, and the team had been together for many years. They had survived the Invardii destruction of the giant Rothii space station Ragnaroth together.

  Once back at her desk, Celia looked for something to do to take her mind off what was happening to Jeneen in the med bay. She opened a computer file she had assembled on Ba’H’Roth, the Rothii home world.

  CHAPTER 2

  ________________

  Finch had suggested the two of them take a team to Ba’H’Roth and see what they could dig up on the desolate Rothii home world. Her boss had a rock solid record of success in his work, and Celia was inclined to back his hunches. The head of the vast – and always expanding – Prometheus project had been an artifact assessor before being scapegoated out of his position by an unscrupulous head of department. He had eventually found a role as a mining boss in the outer reaches of the Solar System.